Adventures in Existentialism

It was a warm Tuesday afternoon that found Ashely and I walking lazily along the hard concrete of RCC towards the bookstore with vague notions of buying dictionaries. Conversation wandered off in that free-floating way that comes after the more concentrated thoughts of the last class, and it was with such a wispy mood that we plucked the little paperbacks of our respective Astrological signs off the shelves and sat down to indulge our curiosity. The bookstore on the RCC campus provided us with comfortable armchairs to pursue these earlier thoughts, so it is no wonder that our conversation drifted towards a more academic topic.

Of course, it never starts out that way. We were sharing the various predictions between our books, but it was when the Romance sections came up that Ashley started talking about her old boyfriend. It could have been a fairly superficial conversation, except that it kept growing out larger. I commented that our generation was the first generation to have all these “drama” stories of being together, then breaking up, then finding someone else, then breaking up. Past generations didn’t do this. Ashley saw my critique on our generation’s romantic lives and raised me one definition of the generation itself. I of course raised the topic to the problem of all generations and the problem of being human at all, and it was here that we bottomed-out into the long, dark mire of Sartrian ethics, of the Nietzschean abyss, of the problem of living when everything is doomed to die.

What I wasn’t paying attention to was, as usual, the most important thing. A young gentleman had sat down near us, in one of the four armchairs around the pseudo-coffee table, and I assumed he was studying. He was writing a good deal in his notebook, and seemed engrossed in it, so the earlier thought that we might be bothering him left my mind fairly early-on. It was only when Ashley suggested we go outside into the sunlight that the young man made himself known and admitted that he had been taking notes, not on homework, but on the entire conversation that we had been having. “Well,” he said, “this is important, I mean, this is really the big question, isn’t it?”

I was smiling inside throughout the whole mechanical formality of self-introductions and “nice-to-meet-you’s” and so forth, but I was able to explain why when he said,

“I didn’t want to intrude or anything, but I couldn’t help but overhear…”

“No, no!” I retorted with a loud smile. “The discussion about the meaning of human life is open to any person, any time, because…well, we’re all part of it!” The young fellow, Jared, was nodding with eyes of an honest clarity, the kind that lack pretenses. I could see Ashley out of the corner of my eye, smiling to herself and almost shaking her head at me, as if my zeal was something she admired like a moth in a case, but I didn’t care. She was part of all of this too, and she knew it, somewhere, inside. With no particular transitionary point, here I found myself suddenly in a sacred moment. The strangeness between the three of us vanished and we were knit unquestioningly together in this moment that was unshared by the casual shoppers of the store.

They bought and sold and typed and talked; but we three stood, poised on the edge of the precipice in contemplative silence, and if only for that moment, then what a moment!

She gave me that unsurprised smile again when I said I wanted to write about it.